“Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.”

By Gideon Swift | Published: March 9, 2010

A funny thing happened on the way to this week’s column — I got “targeted,” “frozen,” “personalized” and “polarized.”

In other words, I got lumped in with the majority of Americans as the “radical right” — you know, the scary people who believe in God, the Constitution, family values, and an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

“Targeting” the opposition is the tactic made famous by left-wing political theorist Saul Alinsky, who wrote in “Rules for Radicals,” that one key route to power is to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” This goes along with another of Alinsky’s rules: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.”

That’s the methodology employed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a so-called human-rights group, in a new report called “Rage on the Right,” which seeks to convince Americans that “the anger seething across the American political landscape” as represented by the Tea Party movement is “shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.”

As an example of how “targeting” works, you have to realize that this SPLC report is allegedly a review of “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” but there is not one mention of Islamic extremism included — nothing about the alleged murder of 13 people at Fort Hood by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan; nothing about the Muslim convert who apparently killed a soldier at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark.; nothing about the father who allegedly killed his daughter by ramming her with a car for being “too Westernized”; nothing about the founder of a Muslim TV station in Buffalo, N.Y., who was charged with beheading his wife for seeking a divorce; nothing about the murder of a college professor in New York state by his Muslim student, allegedly in revenge for “persecuted” Muslims.

Just plain nothing.